Staff

Greg Scott is the director of the Social Science Research Center and a professor in the department of sociology at DePaul University where he teaches courses on substance use and abuse, underground economies, street gangs, consciousness, urban culture, ethnographic documentary film production, photographic/visual sociology, and other topics. He combines quantitative/epidemiological and qualitative/ethnographic methods to research issues stemming from the interaction of structural, network and micro-interactional forces in the illicit drug economy. His specific interests include heroin/opiate overdose morbidity and mortality, drug injection hygiene, the social life of viral and bacterial infections among active illicit drug users, iatrogenic effects of anti-drug law enforcement and the development of communal systems within outlaw communities.

Greg received a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1997 and became an assistant professor in the department of sociology at DePaul University in Chicago in 2000. Over the previous decade, he conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork on drug-dealing street gangs by immersing himself in the heroin and cocaine commerce underground. In 2001 he began a close examination of the “demand and use” aspect of the drug market by living with homeless and precariously housed injection drug users, habitual crack smokers, sex workers, burglars, thieves and drug dealers.

Greg’s semi-traditional ethnographic and epidemiological research has led him recently into producing and directing independent documentary film and radio projects that concentrate on the social, economic, cultural, political and health issues that illicit drug users face. His filmmaking centers on 1) training films for health professionals and laypersons who work with injection drug users and 2) social documentaries to acquaint the public and policy makers with the drug user population.

In 2005 Greg established Sawbuck Productions, a non-profit organization dedicated to create and produce multi-media educational and political materials that concern the well-being of illicit drug users. He has shown his documentaries at film festivals around the world and his work has appeared on television, including the National Geographic Network, BET Network, MSNBC. Currently he is completing production of a feature documentary, “The Brickyard: ‘Home of All the Junkies,’” a film set in the encampment of some 150 mostly homeless drug users and sex workers on Chicago’s west side. His film “Begging for Grace,” which documents the daily life of a panhandling homeless heroin addict named Freeway, was an official selection of the International Documentary Challenge at the 2007 HotDocs Film Festival in Toronto, Canada, and was recently acquired for commercial distribution.

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In 2008 Greg began working as a freelance audio documentarian for Chicago Public Radio’s WBEZ where he produces and directs 8-12-minute stories about street life within Chicago’s “undergrounds.” Topics have included prostitution, heroin overdose and drug selling. His radio series “The Brickyard” relates stories about outlaw communities of heroin addicts, crack smokers, prostitutes, thieves, drug dealers and others living on Chicago’s west side.
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Jessica Bishop-Royse is the SSRC’s Senior Research Methodologist. She joins DePaul after recently completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the Florida State University College of Medicine. While there, she managed the R01 AHRQ grant “Identifying Adverse Events after Discharge from A Community Hospital.” Her graduate work includes fieldwork in Malawi and internships/work experience with federal and state health agencies. She has also conducted program evaluations of county and state health programs. She earned her PhD in Sociology in 2010. Her dissertation examined the individual and community level characteristics associated with racial differences in cause-specific infant mortality. Her areas of interest include: health disparities, infant and maternal health, health services, GIS, methods, and statistics. She often finds herself navigating the fields of sociology, demography, epidemiology, medicine, public health, and policy. She prefers to cherry-pick the best of each of these to address research questions. Prior to graduating from Florida State University, she was recognized for excellence in the classroom with departmental and university teaching awards.

Jessi is well-versed in data collection, Stata, and quantitative research methodology, as well as statistics. She has experience with multi-level analyses, survival analyses, GIS, and multivariate regression. She is currently in the process of learning Bayesian modeling.

Outside of the work context, Jessi is interested in writing, reading, cooking, crafting and just about any athletic endeavor.
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​Linda Levendusky has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with more than a decade of experience in news reporting and editing, primarily for national and local news wire services in Chicago. Her responsibilities at the SSRC include the coordination of a comprehensive on-line directory of ethnographic film archives and a compilation of media profiles of DePaul’s behavioral and social science researchers. Off the clock, Linda’s interest in the history of Modernism propels her to travel whenever she can for close-up views of threatened and rooted landmarks of Modernist architecture in the U.S. and Europe.

Nandhini Gulasingam is a Senior Analyst for IT Solutions at the Social Science Research Center (SSRC) at DePaul University and an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Geography where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Geographic Information Systems (GIS). At the SSRC, she manages GIS, database, web development and data related projects including the faculty research labs. She also consults on faculty research projects involving data processing, analysis and visualization including GIS. She is in charge of design and development of the “Journal of Video Ethnography​,” the first-ever international, peer-reviewed research journal for ethnographic films in the social and behavioral sciences.

She is an experienced technology professional and teacher who has designed, developed, implemented and taught GIS, database, web, mobile, and client-server applications for a variety of organizations in the private, public, not-for profit and educational sectors. Prior to coming to the U.S., Nandhini implemented software systems in the telecommunication, insurance, airline and shipping industries in the Middle East, Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

Nandhini holds an MS in Predictive Analytics, an MS in E-Commerce Technology and GIS Certification from DePaul University. She also has a BS in Math, Physics and Electronics from Bangalore University, India. In addition to GIS, data mining and analysis, her expertise also includes web development, all aspects of software development life cycle, and technology-related training. Her research interests are in geospatial intelligence, predictive analytics and visualization.